Professor Simon Leonard and Katherine Adnett discuss “Pragmatic Adaptive Leadership – Tools for Guiding in Complex Educational Systems”.
Part 1 of Episode 1 of the “Teaching Futures Book Club” explores how the ideas presented in the book can be used to design within and around complexity.
Transcript
Narrator:
You’re listening to the Unlocking Education Futures podcast, your key to discovering the science of learning and its success in the classroom.
Katherine:
Welcome to our Teaching Futures Book Club podcast episode, where we explore navigating the complexity of schooling.
I’m Katherine Adnett, and I’m a Senior Research Fellow at UniSA’s Education Futures Academy. And in this episode, we’re diving into Chapter 1 of the book, Pragmatic Adaptive Leadership, Tools for Guiding in Complex Educational Systems. This book has been co-authored by the team here at EFA: Professor Simon Leonard, Dr. Sam Fowler, Dr. John Paul Kennedy, and Dr. Debbie Devis.
The chapter that we’re looking at introduces the core idea for this course, that leadership in education needs to be adaptive, distributed, enabling, and responsive to the complex systems that we work within as educators.
Today, I’m joined by our very special guest, Professor Simon Leonard, who established and leads the EFA, the Education Futures Academy. Welcome, Simon.
Simon:
Hello.
Katherine:
And maybe we could start with a brief overview of your role here at UniSA, as well as what led you to write this new book, which is to be published in September this year.
Simon:
Thanks, Katherine. My role is, I’m a researcher in what’s called the Learning Sciences. The Learning Sciences is probably better described as learning engineering. It’s the translation of all that research that goes on in all the different sciences, from cognitive science to neuroscience and even a lot of the sociocultural studies. And think about, well, what does that mean once we actually start applying it into real world learning contexts, into schools, into museums, into early learning sites.
And so that’s actually my key role is to do that research. But doing that research is all about partnership because we work with real sites. So what I’ve been doing since I came to UniSA a few years back was to start building this thing that we’ve got now, this Education Futures Academy, as a place where we can do that work that sits in between the pure science research and the pure practice and occupy that middle space of what can we learn and how can we facilitate information flows going both ways? How can we help schools, teachers, educators improve their practice based on what’s been learned in the research? But also how can we help researchers learn by what’s actually happening out in practice? And that’s how I actually see my role is trying to create the context for that sort of conversation.
Katherine:
Tell us about this new book around pragmatic adaptive leadership and what led you to writing it and pulling it together as a group within the Education Futures Academy.
Simon:
Sure. So the book came out of doing the work that I was describing where we’re working in partnership, drawing together people in schools and people in the world of research and really trying to develop and improve on the models that are there for doing that sort of work. Most people who are involved in schools have heard of things like action research. And action research is great. It’s an important part. But I think it’s actually more a part of its biggest use is in the reflective and reflexive practice of teachers. For a range of reasons, it often doesn’t help us actually generate new theory, doesn’t help us get that bigger sense of what’s going on.
In the learning sciences, the area of scholarship that I’m involved in, the default research methodology is called design-based research. And it’s great too, but what we were starting to do is we’re having a look at a lot of the work being done that’s labelled design-based research. And design-based research is basically this idea that we design a new pedagogy protocol, we design a new resource, we redesign an environment, and then iterate and we learn by putting it into practice and seeing what happens, putting it into practice and seeing what happens. AndI’ve been doing that for years. And I just wasn’t completely satisfied that we were capturing the complexity of what actually goes on. Because what we do, we’re trying to go into that real world and we’re trying to get past the idea that it’s like a lab situation, that you can just do a simple experiment. Does this work? Yes, no. Because we know that the real world gets more complicated. But what we haven’t had is good ways to scaffold the work that we do, and particularly work that we do when we’re bringing educators as professionals together with researchers, who we might also describe as professionals, but we’re trying to span some different understandings of how to work in doing that. So the book was really about beginning to put a foundation there for that collaboration. And really the work that we’ve put in the book, it’s what’s grown out of the way that we’ve found over the years that we do our work with the schools that we partner with.
Katherine:
Great. So the design-based research is informing the way that you’re tackling this issue around complexity. And one of the things that you’re proposing is that teachers and leaders in schools are designing within the complexity of their own schools. Is that fair to say?
Simon:
Yeah, I think teachers and leaders in schools and other educational sites, they’re always involved in design. There’s always what we’d call design conjecture, and they might not use the language of design, but design is basically going, we know this about a context and we’re going to intervene in this way, and there’s a theory of change that’s implicit in what we do. And what we’re trying to do is essentially make that, in this book, is provide some methodology for making that theory of change more explicit. And so when we start to do that, it means that we can start taking into account the various components of operation in a school that will actually start to have an interplay. And with the idea that once we start to map that out at the outset, it’s easier to take that into consideration when we’re thinking about the interventions or the changes that we’re looking to make.
Katherine:
Great. So before we go into those practices or those pragmatics, those practices that we’ll delve into a little bit, let’s first have a look at the central idea of complexity, because that underpins a lot of the work that you’ve been doing. And in the book, I think it’s almost the first page you talk about education systems being unpredictable, changeable, and prone to emergence. And that schooling is a complex adaptive system. So what does that mean practically for how we lead and teach?
Simon:
Practically or even pragmatically? I’ve spent basically my research career on this cusp of this spacing between the pure research and what goes on in schools. And the thing that just frustrates me so much is we come into schools doing research where we’ve got this assumption, it’s what we call a linear system. So there’s a whole lot of language that we use here that comes out of complexity science about complexity and linear and all of that. But if we pull that back and just sort of said, whenever I’m saying linear, what we’re really trying to get to there is as though there’s just one thing happening. And schools often, any system tries to collapse it to that. What are we here to do? But you just can’t do that in a school. Schools don’t have one thing that they’re there for. And we get things like, we’ll drill into kids. We’re here trying to, we’re here for learning. Kids aren’t just at school for learning. Kids are at school for, yes, learning, but for the social interaction. And if we move away from the word learning, which often we just think about the sort of the cognitive elements, right? I think what we’re actually trying to achieve through schools is the development of children in terms of their cognitive capability, but also their emotional, their social, you might even go into the spiritual self. And allOf those things are absolutely important. And whenever we read the objectives of a school or a school system, they’re all there. And so when we were talking about complexity, we were saying, well, there’s all of those different goals going on, and they’re all going on all at once. And we’re bringing together both children and adults who are at all different places in terms of where those goals are at.
And so the way they interact is never, you know, take student, apply learning, get outcome, which is a linear system. It’s take student with all of the inputs of their past and their experience and their culture and put them next to another child who’s got a different set of all of those things and have them interact with resources, with curriculum, with teachers across multiple lessons. That’s what we’re starting to describe as a complex system. And it’s the interaction of all of those things is actually what we genuinely get. The world never works. The social world never works in that linear fashion that we’d like of, you know, take child, add learning. It just doesn’t happen. So that’s what we’re getting at.
Now, practically, what that means for teachers, leaders, is that we need to, in my view, we need to stop thinking that that linear model of what actually goes on in a classroom in any way reflects reality. We need to be taking into account that a student’s motivation and attitude might be just as important as a particular cognitive capacity. We need to be taking into account that cognitive capacities actually underpin the way that we operate in a classroom. And so the interaction of those things are important.
And when we’re thinking about the design of our lessons or the design of our school structures or the design of the way that we support our teachers to develop, we’re engaged in an interaction of not just multiple factors, but multitudinous factors.
Katherine:
So it’s really interesting because there’s so much complexity within schools. It could be seen as overwhelming for leaders and teachers to work out how to navigate that.
I was wondering if you could talk briefly about what do you think are the risks when leadership simplifies this complexity into narrow performance metrics or linear targets? You know, we just had the NAPLAN scores released. We had ATAR at the beginning of the year. What are some of the risks if we continue along that path of really prioritising that performativity?
Simon:
I’ll approach those questions. I think very quickly about what are the alternative metrics, right? So if we take NAPLAN, NAPLAN is a measure of some particular basic skills, which you might overlay and say it’s a measure of some particular cognitive capacity. It doesn’t measure student well-being. It doesn’t measure students’ intention to continue in their education. And so you can quickly put in, even if you want to take that metrics approach, put in some alternative metrics; school attendance.
And since COVID, school attendance has dropped dramatically. Somewhere along that process, we broke the idea that we’re going to school is just something that everyone has to do. And we’ve seen the day-to-day attendance drop from well into the 90% range, which is just, yeah, people are sick and have those things. That’s the normal. There’s a good 10% of the student population now who are just going, yeah, I’m not going to school. And that increase in school refusal. So there’s a metric that we can be looking at.
And when we start looking at risks, well, the risk is that metric gets worse. Something that in our research that we’ve looked at a bit, and we’ve got in our research program quite tied up with an idea of widening participation in higher education, getting students, young people from communities that are traditionally underrepresented in higher education to build that capacity to choose higher education and then act on that choice.
And so one of the key measures that we take there is intention to keep studying beyond the time when it becomes compulsory. And we see absolutelyno relationship between that and NAPLAN. And so again, the risk is in trying to optimise a system to improve a particular cognitive measure that we actually do damage to some of the other important things that are absolute goals of our system.
And schools are here as ecosystems for the development of the public good, for the development of children into having a life worth living, to be able to participate in a society and in an economy.
And the risk is that we’re actually, if we’re not looking at the complexity of interactions that lead to those outcomes, if we optimise back down to really simple measures of things that may not be entirely predictive of the outcome that we’re actually after, that we actually get at school doing, in the technical terms, it’s called a perverse outcome.
We’re actively looking for lifelong learners. It says that in the Australian Declaration on Education. But maybe what we’re doing is, or the risk if we get it wrong, is that we get not lifelong learners, but people with a lifelong hate of learning.
So, yeah, I think the risks are actually pretty big. And I think we’re seeing a lot of that playing out in our system.
We work in a system that in the research literature, we talk about it being a neoliberal approach to schooling where we put the schools in competition and competition needs a measure, so we’ve got to go for small measures.
And what we’ve seen is increasing anxiety. And that’s the huge one. Increasing school refusal. We’re actually seeing a decrease in students’ participation in some of the courses that traditionally lead to higher education. The numbers in a lot of those pathways within the school system are dropping.
So we’re seeing and we’re living in the perverse outcomes. These aren’t just risks. These are risks that we’re seeing every day in schools.
Katherine:
So, absolutely complex environments in which we’re working. And that’s a beautiful segue into talking about maybe complexity science and what’s the role of complexity science in helping leaders and teachers to really understand and see what’s happening within their own local learning communities.
Simon:
Yeah, it’s really been interesting for me. Complexity science really emerges in the sciences, the hard sciences, in the middle of the last century. And we started building the mathematics, basically, to look at the interaction of complex systems. So we would be looking there at storm systems or ecosystems, pretty much anything with the word systems in it.
And what we see in complex systems is that they’re not entirely predictable. Anyone who’s tried to follow the BOM weather forecasts will know that we’ve got a good guide because complexity science can give us a good guide. But what we can do is build models that are largely predictive but not entirely.
And that’s because complex systems have feedback systems. They have tipping points. They have emergent properties. And all of the ways of working with this was developed in the physical sciences to understand things like the weather.
But what we’re seeing happen since is we’ve started applying that way of thinking into understanding social systems. And I see learning as a cognitive, social, cultural combination that always takes place within highly social institutions like schools or universities.
So what complexity science gives us is a different set of tools from that conception that we had. And we can look at that just in the way that we do school science. School science, and I mean chemistry, physics, that sort of science, we still kind of teach this vision of science that has been outdated for 50 years or more, of the linear where we go, if we control all the variables and just look at the one thing, that’s a pathway to truth. But what’s actually happening in the physical sciences, and it’s really been happening for 50, 60, 70 years, is most of that science has moved more into this approach that we call modelling. We develop the complex models because the interactions of multiple factors all at once can only be modelled. They can’t be completely brought down, and the term in the research is reduced. There’s a reductive approach to making truth. But we can’t take that reductive approach really to most of the meaningful questions that are left.
So what complexity science offers us is, both at the technical level of we can even get into quite complex mathematics, but even just at the metaphorical level of starting to understand, it gives us a different way to understand what’s going on in a school. It means that we don’t need to just go, yeah, student as this isolated entity that we can do work on, but student as someone who lives within a complex social cognitive environment.
Katherine:
So the opposite of a reductive approach, which you talked about. Let’s move now into pragmatics. So let’s look into the practices. And what is pragmatic adaptive leadership? So PAL introduces a number of key practices:
- Pragmatic adaptive modelling
- Pragmatic adaptive design
Could you give us a quick overview of what they are and how they work together?
Simon:
So the idea of pragmatic is just to go, look, within this complex system that we live in, and say any school, every school, not just the ones that we sometimes talk about as complex sites because they’re dealing with additional social needs, but even in the best of environments, in the best resource base with the most, everything going right, it’s a complex system.
And the challenge for leaders and the challenge for teachers in that is to take action because not taking action is never an option. We can never, or even not taking action is actually an action because it’s continuing in the status quo or something like that.
Katherine:
Or perpetuating chaos.
Simon:
I mean, never in my classroom, but I mean, if your classroom doesn’t go into chaos occasionally, you’re probably not quite doing your job.
Katherine:
True.
Simon:
So yeah, so what I was looking at there with the idea of the pragmatic was to be able to sit with the complexity and to be able to not seek to reduce it to a linear thing that it is, but to still take action, which is to still be pragmatic about it and go, you still got to do something. And what’s never an option is to sit there and take forever to work out all the details of what’s going on because we just keep moving on. This is a system that’s always in action.
So yeah, so that’s what I was really driving at with this idea of pragmatism, sit with the complexity, be able to take action within the complexity. And probably what that calls on is something that’s like, I don’t know, it’s an idea like wisdom. We need to be able to go with the best information that I have available and the best knowledge that I can bring to this, what action am I going to take?
So what we’ve done in the book is pull that out into a set of practices. And in the book, we drew that as a hexagon. Anyone who have played Trivial Pursuit, we saw that Trivial Pursuit piece in there a little bit as we drew it up. And it’s interesting, we started off numbering, there’s the six segments in our hexagon. And when we started off with numbers in the diagram, and what we quickly decided is we looked at that was those numbers were forcing a linear nature to this. And it was like, yeah, what you do is start with futures thinking, then you go to situational mapping. And we looked at what we actually do, and it doesn’t work like that. Really, these practices could be more as, these are a menu of choices and things that we move from one to another as the pragmatic needs of the project or leading a school or leading a classroom demand. What we’ve got in there, futures thinking, is sitting underneath that as a set of protocols that are all about imagining what our school could be, where do we want, what’s the end state.
Debbie, who you’ll talk to later, does a lot of work in gamification and has taught me how the world of gaming has actually, role playing games, computer games, has moved from, I don’t know, the old days where Space Invaders, whoever got the highest score won and shot down the most things, but it’s moved into far more complex ideas of a win state rather than just a clear objective. And so we’re picking up on some of those ideas. How do we imagine what is the win state for our project? What is the win state for our school, for our classroom?
The situational mapping is really talking, again, some ways that we go about working out what is because we’re never working with that blank slate. And this is a famous one in education, John Locke and the idea that the child was a blank slate. We’re going, well, the system of a school isn’t a blank slate either. The system of a school exists. Even if it’s a brand new school, it’s bringing together people that bring stuff to it. So situational mapping is mapping out what’s already a complex system before we do anything.
And then futures modelling is where we start to try and look for the leverage points. So once we’ve understood the situation, how do we take that? Where are the points where we can take action? And so we identify, we talk about tensions and enablers. How do we identify the things that we can amplify? I know you’ve done some work using that metaphor, Katherine, and working out where are the tensions that we might need to address if we’re to get back to that win state. And so those three practices we call modelling.
And then we go into a phase of design. Once we’ve identified where are the opportunities to take action in the system, what is the action? We decide what are the actions that we can take? What are the interventions? What’s the innovation? And then there’s processes in that of monitoring what actually happens. And yeah, and that’s obviously the key piece. And so it becomes, these are approaches to making our schools and our classrooms and our research projects learning organisations.
So yeah, what’s there? What are we choosing to do? How do we know what’s actually happened as a result? And typically that doesn’t come back to a simple answer of something like, well, did the action we took work? Sometimes we’ll get a really clear indication that it didn’t work. Sometimes we’ll get a really clear indication like that chaos. But most things that we do in educational contexts, they work well or they work less well or they work for some students. And so we end up with questions like, you know, what worked for whom in what context? All as a way of thinking about, well, what do we do next? Which is, again, the pragmatic idea. We’re never arriving in our interventions into learning systems at an answer. We’re always arriving into, we’ve changed the system. But the world around that system keeps changing. So we’re never going to be stable. So it’s always a piece of, yeah, move from here to here. What’s happened? Come up for breath. Let’s have a look. Let’s take that pause. Make a clear decision on what we do next.
Katherine:
And really, that reminds me of teachers that I’ve admired and leaders that I’ve admired over the course of my career. That’s what they naturally do. They’re constantly in that process of sense making, trying to understand what’s happening within their, whether it be their classroom learning system or whether it’s a broader school system or sector. That’s what they do. They are very adaptive. They can read the room. They’re constantly seeing or sensing changes and tensions and looking at how to enable. So this gives some practical tools that are underpinned by research that gives a direction for leaders and teachers to help them to know what they could do to learn more about what’s happening and then start to design for a way forward.
Narrator:
You’re listening to the Unlocking Education Futures podcast, your key to discovering the science of learning and its success in the classroom.
